We scored a rare free weekend and flipped a coin to decide whether to go to Memphis! or take Daisy out for the first camping trip of 2012. Memphis! won out after a two-out-of-three flip session. In eastern Arkansas we came upon a double rainbow that just wouldn’t go away. After about 15 minutes of driving with it right outside the window we decided to pull over and partake of its glory.

We really wanted to go to Memphis! in order to eat at Rendezvous. In the past, we’ve gotten over that way at least once a year, but we let three years go by this time. Abby was two the last time we ate the succulent dry-rubbed BBQ, so she didn’t remember just how great it is.

Her eyes fired up when she took that first chomp. And rightly so. The restaurant was hitting on all cylinders that night.

We hit Mud Island the next day. The poles at the marina are marked with the high-water level from last year’s epic floods.

Mud Island is home to a half-mile long scale replica of the lower Mississippi River, which is extremely neato. It’s a great place for kids because they can get in the water and splash around. Abby looks like a giantess standing athwart the mightiest river in North America.

And this guy in a kayak looks like a tiny ant man compared to the full monty of Ol’ Man River.

On our final full day in San Antone I got up at the butt crack of dawn to shoot the Alamo when it wouldn’t be swarmed with tourists and vendors hawking to the tourists. It was pretty neat being the only person visiting the Alamo besides the grounds crew blowing off the walkway with super loud industrial strength leaf blowers.

Around the corner from the Alamo is the Menger Bar.

Gina brought up the idea of making a jaunt down to the border, but I had a vague idea that that part of the border was a bad place to be. I was right. But I came across a pamphlet touting the San Antonio Market Square. It’s a two-block area of shops filled with Mexican tourist crap. It’s as if they brought the border two hours north so that we could experience a different culture without being decapitated and our gutted carcasses stuffed with cocaine. It was a great place to take pictures because everything was colorful and arrayed in interesting patterns. I was happy to see that these Lucha Libre masks were a real thing and not just a prop from a bad Jack Black movie.

A lot of Virgin Mary kitsch going on in that place.

Judging from the amount of stock, the most popular item for border tourists are theCatrina dolls of Dia de los Muertos fame. Gina bought a doll decked out in a wedding dress. The doll. Not Gina.

It’s apparently a thing in Texas to take pictures of your kids among the blue bonnets. We found a good patch on the outskirts of the city and forced Abby to sit for a portrait. A man and his two kids were there doing the same thing.

I didn’t have any light modifiers with me so I used two plastic Walgreens bags as a makeshift softbox. As much as I’d like to chalk this idea up to being a genius, I had recently seen this technique demonstrated on the Strobist blog.

Gina served as my voice-activated light stand.

We kicked off our third day by hitting a caverns tour in the morning. It was really dark underground so no pictures. The next morning we hit the Alamo, a short walk under the interstate from our hotel. It turns out that Texas takes the Alamo way too seriously. When we walked in the front door I was immediately accosted for wearing a hat. You see, the Alamo is a shrine and any arbitrary form of disrespect is met with swift and brutal consequences. It’s not OK to wear a hat inside the Alamo, but it’s perfectly fine to operate a money grubbing souvenir stand selling the usual crappy items aimed at tourists and their kids. For all the love of the Alamo, it’s not even a very good museum. The exhibits are sparse and do only a superficial job of explaining the history. Also, photos aren’t allowed. I got the top photo of the best exhibit in the place by putting my camera on its super-spy-silent mode and firing from the hip.

Gina and Abby bolted to the nearby children’s museum while I wandered downtown taking pictures.

The Texas spring break was the week before we were there.

We spent the late afternoon and evening at the River Walk.

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. This one was pretty much like the last several. We cooked the turkey per Alton Brown’s instructions and it turned out great again. I didn’t produce much in the way of great photos. The actual meal was a little fragmented because we didn’t get the food on the table until just before the Hogs started playing. We served buffet style and so didn’t load down the table with bowls and serving dishes filled with feastables, which would have made the pictures better.

I lit the table this year with a big studio strobe in each corner. My camera thanked me for not having to deal with those little Nikon SB600s this time.

While watching Alton Brown’s new Thanksgiving episode of “Good Eats” I was struck with the notion to prepare the pecan pie featured in the episode. I had to visit several stores to find the right tart pan, the right kind of syrup and the right kind of specially prepared pecans. (The recipe calls for spicy pecans but I used honey pecans.) By the way, I’d never made a pie before in my life. It was quite a hit amongst the pecan aficionados in the family.

Katie and Amy brought this game back with them from Phoenix that involves two raised boards with holes in them and tossing bags filled with corn. (Being a couple of wits, they call the game Cornhole. An inspired choice in my opinion.) I’d never heard of it but in an inspired bit of naming it’s called Cornhole and there’s an American Cornhole Association that governs the rules of play. The object is nearly identical to horseshoes in that you throw the bags and score points based on how close to the hole the bag lands. I don’t know how they got Razorback-themed boards.

Gramps had a big time with his Frankenstein mask.

Abby making her jack-o-lantern face.

A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.

Gina tried the in-your-face technique. I don’t have any pictures of Abby’s technique because she was ready to call it quits after the walk across the hot field. She did very little digging.

We took some of our dirt up to the giant water trough to try the wet method of diamond discovery. It worked no better than the dry method. We booked out of there after about 30 minutes. All in all we spent about an hour searching for diamonds.

The next day we hit the Ka-do-ha Indian Village on the outskirts of Murfreesboro. It’s a private museum/tourist trap whose claim to fame is several excavated Indian burial mounds. The holes have these little signs that explain what you’re looking at, except most of the writing on the signs has just about faded away. The bones in the bottom aren’t real. They are facsimiles of the bones that were found. The real bones were supposedly reburied somewhere else.

Ka-do-ha Indian Village is also home to the World’s Biggest Diamond.

Abby and I were looking for something to do inside out of the heat that didn’t involve watching TV, so we decided to get into the movie making bidness. We decided to give Pixar a run for their money by making a stop motion animation short as our first project. We needed a camera dolly, so I strapped my camera to the top of Abby’s Barbie VW Beetle. I positioned the camera for each shot and took care of the focusing. Abby moved the train between frames and pushed the camera’s shutter button. She also helped solve the problem of keeping the train positioned on the bridge approaches without rolling backward or forward. We’re thinking of doing a frame-for-frame homage to “Citizen Kane” for our next effort.

It’s been so hot for so long here that 105 degree days are no longer remarkable. A couple weeks ago we decided to hit the coolest spot in the state that’s not inside a building: Blanchard Springs Caverns. Abby referred to it as going into the earth.

The cavern is actually a three level affair with the third level being an underground river or creek. It emerges from the mountain at Blanchard Spring.

We stopped off at Mountain View, folk music capital of the region, to check out the street music and eat supper.

We’ve replaced Ol’ Leaky with a new pop-up camper. Abby christened it Daisy. Daisy has a number of improvements over OL, namely she doesn’t leak. And she has an air conditioner, a refrigerator and she doesn’t have that odd smell that OL had. Because Abby named the thing Daisy we thought it would be clever to take her to Daisy State Park on Lake Greeson for her maiden voyage. The temperature was approaching Hell levels so we knew it would be a stern test for the air conditioner. I didn’t have high hopes, but I was pleasantly surprised. The camper stayed quite cool, probably in the high 70′s while it was 100 outside. I even had to turn it down during the night.

We drove over to Cossatot River State Park. It was so hot that it was best to either be in the water or in an air conditioned vehicle. We stopped to swim at the Brushy Creek Recreation Area on Highway 246. Lots of people there. Later we drove around to the visitors’ center and the Highway 278 bridge.

I brought a fishing rod, but Gina caught the fish.

Cossatot rocks.